Look at Eisenhower. He not good at strategy but had great relationship with the British and was a great organizer.
New Fast-Attack Nuclear Submarines to be Named Arizona and Oklahoma
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Look at Eisenhower. He not good at strategy but had great relationship with the British and was a great organizer.
HalcyonDaze
Contributor
Lately I've been thinking of the old saying "Amateurs discuss tactics, veterans discuss strategy, professionals discuss logistics." If you're a leader who excels at the last part and can leave the other two up to subordinates, the results tend to be good.
Recently I was looking at some of the outposts the PRC has built in the Spratly Islands; aside from being horrified at the mess they made of a lot of coral reefs I have to wonder how logistically sustainable those are. Supplies would have to be shipped or flown in from the mainland and I'd love to run those things by a coastal engineer and ask how well they'd hold up in a storm or even normal subsidence, wave action, and sea level rise.
Unfortunately the sub has been found in 3 pieces at 2700ft. Indonesia is planning on bringing in a salvage team to lift it to the surface. A considerable challenge given the depth and the shape the wreck is in.
HalcyonDaze
Contributor
So there's a rather heated argument going on in some quarters about the latest batch of documents related to USS Thresher's loss that was just released under the Freedom Of Information Act; among them were logs from USS Seawolf the following day where she (supposedly) reported active sonar pings, garbled voice communications, and banging on the hull.
USS Thresher’s Crew May Have Survived Many Hours After Its Disappearance According To New Docs
Suffice to say I think the people making that interpretation - including one rather well-known former sonar operator on YouTube - ought to get metaphorically raked over the coals for hyping this up. Besides the fact that all the other evidence shows Thresher went past crush depth and imploded just after 9:18 am local time on April 10, 1963, the hypotheses that Thresher either a) somehow remained partially intact with survivors at a depth of 8,400 ft (6,000 ft past where she is believed to have imploded and scattered herself in five main pieces across an area of 33 acres) or b) was somehow floating neutral above crush depth for close to a day with enough power to run the active sonar but not enough to surface before finally sinking both don't pass the sniff test.
USS Thresher’s Crew May Have Survived Many Hours After Its Disappearance According To New Docs
Suffice to say I think the people making that interpretation - including one rather well-known former sonar operator on YouTube - ought to get metaphorically raked over the coals for hyping this up. Besides the fact that all the other evidence shows Thresher went past crush depth and imploded just after 9:18 am local time on April 10, 1963, the hypotheses that Thresher either a) somehow remained partially intact with survivors at a depth of 8,400 ft (6,000 ft past where she is believed to have imploded and scattered herself in five main pieces across an area of 33 acres) or b) was somehow floating neutral above crush depth for close to a day with enough power to run the active sonar but not enough to surface before finally sinking both don't pass the sniff test.
Totally agree. The idea that it was hanging at 1100’ neutrally buoyant just should not make sense to anyone who earned dolphins.
Logs from the USS Seawolf, really a sub that wasn't built till way way after the thresher was lost has logs.
HalcyonDaze
Contributor
The logs are from SSN-575 Seawolf, not SSN-21. The former was the second SSN commissioned after Nautilus; she was originally a test boat for a liquid sodium-cooled reactor that was a headache (the boat earned the nickname "Blue Haze" if I recall) and was quickly stripped out and replaced with a standard PWR. Along with USS Halibut, another single-example early nuclear boat that was specifically built to fire Regulus cruise missiles, she was considered to be a dead-end design and a "clunker;" in the late 60s and early 70s both were heavily refitted for cable-tapping and clandestine salvage work.
USS Seawolf (SSN-575) - Wikipedia
Small nit: Some dates seem a little off in this article. The Seawolf must have been was attached to Submarine Development Group I before 1973. I was briefed to go aboard her in 1972, which fortunately didn't happen. It was well known that divers were at Mare Island working on her along with the Halibut in 1971. The dive team I was on aboard the USS Elk River was converted into a saturation training platform after we completed the operational evaluation of the Mark II Mod 0 Deep Dive System. Most saturation training was at NEDU in Washington DC before that.
I remember scuttlebutt about divers on the Halibut and Seawolf when I was at First Class Diving School in DC, which was in the same building as NEDU, so it was no secret. Just to be clear, there was a solid brick wall between the school and NEDU, literally and figuratively. I was able to tour NEDU but only when all the classified stuff was stowed.
HalcyonDaze
Contributor
The article has her going into Mare Island for conversion in January 1971 through June 1973; I would presume the divers were assigned to her during conversion. Part of the work on Halibut at least involved fitting a decompression/lockout chamber disguised as a DSRV atop the aft escape trunk; the cover story was that she was being utilized as the mothership for the Mystic and Avalon.
I suppose it is possible that the command wasn't transferred to Sub-Dev-Gru-1 until '73 and the divers were TAD (Temporary Active Duty). I spent about have my time in the Navy assigned TAD to ships I was never aboard as a way to get around Navy bureaucracy. All the Sea Lab divers were TAD years before I was old enough to join the Navy.
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